Painting is like silent poem, said Simonides, poet from ancient Greece.Paintings are icons, doors to the Platonian world above the heavens. Paintings on my blog are just those icons, which lead a viewer into the magic world of harmony and beauty. Artists who present their achievements on my blog have a very different cultural and national background, they represent variety of artistic traditions and schools

Donald Stuart Leslie Friend (6 February 1915 – 16 August 1989) was an Australian artist, writer and diaristBorn in Sydney, precociously talented both as an artist and a writer, Friend grew up in the artistic circle of his bohemian mother. He studied with Sydney Long (1931) and Dattilo Rubbo (1934–1935), and later in London (1936–1937) at the Westminster School of Art with Mark Gertler and Bernard Meninsky. During World War II he served as a gunner with the AIF, and while stationed at Albury began an important friendship with Russell Drysdale which was to culminate in their joint discovery of Hill End, a quasi-abandoned gold mining village near Bathurst, New South Wales, which was to become something of an artists' colony in the 1950s. He also served as an official war artist in Labuan and Balikpapan in 1945.After the war he lived for a time in the Sydney mansion-boarding house Merioola, exhibiting with the so-called Merioola Group.Much of Friend's life and career were spent outside Australia, in places as diverse as Nigeria (late 1930s, where he served as financial advisor to the Ogoga of Ikerre), Italy (several visits in the 1950s), Sri Lanka (late 1950s – early 1960s, from whence dates this view of the city of Colombo), and Bali from 1968 until his final return to Sydney in 1980.Wikipedia

Hans Hofmann 1880-1966..American painter, teacher and theorist of German birth.Almost all the work produced by Hofmann in Paris was destroyed in World War I. He was visiting Germany when war was declared and was unable to return to France, but for health reasons he was pronounced unfit for service. To support himself he opened his own art school in 1915. He had relatively few pupils during the war, but as his fame spread after 1918 he attracted students from all over the world.

In the 1930s and 1940s Hofmann played an increasingly prominent role in American art, particularly in transmitting modernist theories and new artistic developments. He taught many younger artists who later became established figures. The importance of his own art was for a long time overshadowed by his immense influence as a teacher and theorist, but by the late 1950s he was beginning to be recognised as one of the major figures of Abstract expressionism.

Within a few years, however, Hofmann had developed a highly distinctive form of abstraction based on patches of vivid colour, vigorous gestures and textural contrasts. Although the dense surfaces and impulsive application of paint in his works of the 1950s can be associated with action painting, his work was distinguished by a rigorous concern with pictorial structure, spatial illusion and colour relationships. He is admired for his late paintings in which he placed rectangles of single colours against more loosely painted backgrounds to establish dynamic pictorial relationships as well as a strong surface design. (tate.org.uk)

I am a photographer / digital artist who identifies mostly with painters . I take a shot and alter beyond recognition . The thrill , for me, is seeing what I can discover in the course of my crazy process . My stuff comes out in a variety of ways . Here , however, I choose to share some of my " camera paintings " as I like to call them .Eric John Campbell Westlake , Oh. USA